Writing about the food, farmers, fishermen, and folk of Long Island's North Fork.

December 2017

12/26/2017

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO On the street where she lived… in an apartment Melania shared with her sister, Ines.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on December 14, 2017

When I travel, I try to learn something. So when I visited Slovenia recently, I went with an urge to better understand a presidential spouse about whom I have questions.

Many questions.

Melania Trump, born and raised in Slovenia, is the second foreign-born first lady, after Louisa Adams, born in London in 1775. I wondered: Is there anything recognizably Slovenian about Melania? What do Slovenes think of her? And most of all, what did she see in Donald Trump?

Factual information about Melania before she met Trump is sparse. Born Melanija Knavs, she had a sister and two parents, went to high school and college in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and worked as a model before and after moving to America.

Reminiscent of Melania’s confinement within the walls of Trump Tower and the White House, Slovenia lies tightly wedged within the space between Italy and Croatia, with alpine mountains in the north and a karst (a region of soluble rocks such as limestone) and cave-riddled south that features about 30 miles of Adriatic Sea coastline. Slovenia was under communist rule when Melania lived there, so she’s used to life under a repressive regime.

The Slovenian language is full of unpronounceable clusters of consonants, which was only a problem for me when it came to eating. I solved it by ordering dishes with a nice balance of vowels and consonants, such as Kremna Rezina (multi-layer cream pastry also known as Lake Bled Cake) and potica, a rich, nut-stuffed cake.

The deliciousness of potica inspired Pope Francis to ask Melania if she feeds it to Donald Trump, nearly sparking an international incident when she heard him say pizza, not po-teetz-a. Owing to the consonant-clustering problem, I never did get to taste the cheese and walnut stuffed delicacy called struklji.

When Melania said in an interview that she speaks “a few languages,” many Americans, including me, figured she was exaggerating her linguistic prowess. But in Slovenia I discovered that everyone speaks four languages, usually Slovenian, Italian, English and French.

I asked every waiter, bus driver, farmer and gas station attendant I met, and could not find one person who spoke fewer than three. Mostly their English was better than mine (I had jet lag). So yeah, I believe that she speaks a few languages. A better question is how come most Americans don’t?

Wi-Fi has achieved the same penetration in Slovene society as drinking water. At first, I asked for the Wi-Fi password in every café, until a bartender in a remote mountain village laughed at me. “Of course we have free Wi-Fi,” he said. “Everyone has free Wi-Fi. What do you think this is, North Korea?”

His English was very good.

Slovenia has an excellent highway system, talented drivers and an almost complete absence of speed limit signage. Slovenians don’t need signs, because the standard limits are common knowledge. Like Melania, I was aware of constant surveillance by cameras, albeit the traffic-enforcing kind. I am sorry to report that foreign visitors often receive speeding tickets by mail from Slovenian authorities weeks after returning home.

My constant companion during this trip was “Slovenology,” by the American writer Noah Charney. It’s a peculiar and delightful guidebook whose subject is as much the Slovene people as it is the country’s landmarks and scenery.

People even stopped me on the street to say how great it was — it’s available in Slovenian and English — and how Charney really “gets” Slovenians.

Charney identifies a fundamental Slovene characteristic, which is expressed in the common aphorism, “If you look at the stars, you’ll step in dung.” I think this tendency to avoid being a showoff is at the root of one of my questions about Melania: What do Slovenes think of her?

Aside from a few hoping to sell something related to her fame, they don’t think much.

When she was 23, Melania made a television commercial in Slovenia in which she played the president of the United States. Dressed in a tan raincoat with flowing brown hair, she waved from her limousine, issued orders, took important phone calls and, in the final scene, signed off on immigration papers.

Seeing her performance, it’s impossible not to think she had dreams of living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She looked presidential. I think when she met Donald Trump five years later, she already had the training and the desire, and saw in him the money and connections to put them on a path to the presidency before other people saw that possibility.

What did the daughter of Slovenia see in the dotard of real estate? I think she saw the White House. And as an immigrant, she may have a better appreciation of the possibilities of the United States than her husband.

12/13/2017

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO | The Long Island turnip served mashed with a whole roasted fish and caramelized onions.

When 91-year-old Wanda Wittmeier passed away in May of 2014, she went out at the top of her game. The Modern Snack Bar, a diner she founded in 1950 in Aquebogue, managed by her sons John and Otto, had just been named one of the country’s 10 best, and her lemon meringue pie garnered similar honors.

Of all the dishes served by the Wittmeier family at their venerable restaurant on the Main Road, the old-school take on mashed turnips connects most directly to the food and the culture of Long Island. Turnips are eaten with enthusiasm everywhere except America. The popularity of turnips on the East End, especially the very large and sweet ones grown during our long, mild fall, speaks to an old world, Eastern European immigrant experience of the 20th century that celebrated a life of prosperity and plenty.

Sweeter than mashed potatoes, turnips are a creamy, fluffy side dish that pairs well with the glorious North Fork fish and poultry on a holiday table.

The only trouble is, the Modern Snack Bar closes for the season this weekend, so if you want mashed turnips for the holidays you can either buy now and freeze, or make your own.

This year’s impressive turnip crop inspired me to mash my own. Careful not to buy mislabeled rutabagas (they lack the lovely purple top of a turnip, and are less sweet) I chose the biggest turnips I could find. Large root vegetables retain their moisture better than smaller ones, so the local turnips I buy today will get me through the holidays and beyond.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO | The Long Island turnip.

I am not privy to the secret of the Wittmeier’s mashed turnips, if a secret there is. But if you don’t want to waste a perfectly good turnip season waiting for the Modern Snack Bar to reopen in March, try this.

Mashed turnipsin the manner of the Modern Snack Bar

Serves 6

Long Island turnips, peeled and cut into 3 inch chunks to make 2 pounds

2 teaspoons of salt

2 tablespoons of butter

¼ cup cream

1. Place the cubed turnips in a sauce pan, barely covered with water, add salt and cook over medium heat until the turnips are soft and slide off the fork, about 20 minutes.

2. Put the hot turnips in a food processor with the butter and process until smooth.

3. Add the cream and process until blended.

4. Serve the mashed turnips garnished with caramelized onions or make a mattress of mashed turnip on each plate and tuck a roasted filet into it.

Fish roasted wholewith caramelized onions

Serves 2

2 tablespoons olive oil

One coarsely chopped onion

A small, meaty, white-fleshed fish, such as sea bream, or porgy, scaled, gutted, fins trimmed, and head on. Pick one that is about two inches thick and will barely fit inside a 10-inch pan.

2 teaspoons salt

5 cherry tomatoes

1 sprig of thyme

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

2. On the stovetop, stir the olive oil and the chopped onion over medium heat in an iron skillet or an ovenproof pan just large enough to hold the fish, until the onions quietly sizzle and start to soften.

3. Meanwhile make four or five vertical cuts on each side of the fish and rub the salt into the slashes and all over the fish, inside and out.

4. Halve the cherry tomatoes and put them and the thyme sprig inside the fish cavity.

5. Rub one tablespoon of the olive oil into the fish, and set it aside until the onions get soft.

6. Place the prepared fish on top of the onions, and put the dish in the hot oven for about 15 minutes, until the onions near the sides of the skillet get brown. Use a spoon to remove the browned onions to garnish the mashed turnips, and leave the rest of the onions under the fish to continue cooking. The fish will likely need another 5 minutes, but keep an eye on it; it should be soft and flaky, not dry.

Last week the veil was lifted on a question at the center of both the East End’s culture and its economy: How many Peconic Bay scallops made it through algae blooms, whelk attacks and underwater landslides and landed on dinner tables this season.

Sunrise on Monday, Nov. 6, marked the opening of New York State waters for harvesting this sweet local delicacy and, by 7 a.m., it was clear there were plenty of scallops to be taken.

There are many ways for a scallop to die before its time, and biologist Stephen Tettelbach is familiar with all of them. A professor at Long Island University, Mr. Tettlebach is the co-leader of a scallop restoration project run out of the Cornell Cooperative Extension Marine Program in Southold. That program has helped increase commercial shellfish revenues to the local economy by $8 million since 2006. He measures program success with data gathered from 20 dive sites in the Peconic Estuary, where he records the number, size and condition of bay scallops using forensic techniques worthy of a medical examiner on a murder case.

There is a story in every shell.

A slight ridge indicates that a scallop has been affected by some shock, such as an attack by a crab or a toxic algae bloom. A notch in the edge of the shell is the telltale sign of attempted murder by a whelk. The position of the scallop’s growth ring indicates its age, but also the speed of growth, and how favorable conditions in the bay have been. Mr. Tettelbach has also documented wintertime mass burials of hibernating scallops when underwater sediments shifted, and the scallops didn’t escape.

On a recent dive, he was joined by Scott Hughes, a Cornell marine resources specialist, and graduate students Marissa Velasquez and Steve Heck. Examining the bay bottom at four scalloping sites — Cedar Light, Sag Harbor, Barcelona and Split Rock — they documented improvements in the density and size of the scallops at those sites over 2016.

“There were a lot of smilers!” Mr. Hughes said, bobbing to the surface after a 10-minute dive in Northwest Harbor.

That’s marine-biologist-speak for big, adult scallops opening their shells wide to feed on plankton. At the Sag Harbor site, Mr. Tettelbach surfaced with an 86-millimeter bay scallop in his collection bag, one of the largest he’s ever found. Back on the boat, the team measured and recorded the size and condition of each bivalve as the boat rocked and the wind blew. Then they threw them back, including the one that was bigger than a baseball.

The tiny, tasty shellfish used to be worth $1.5 million a year to the East End commercial fishery. But hard times fell in the mid-1980s, when a devastating brown tide — an algae bloom fueled by water pollution, especially nitrates and phosphorus associated with human waste — dealt a shocking blow to all shellfish, but particularly the Peconic Bay scallop.

Last week, things were looking up when Shelter Island bayman Steve Lenox, on the way to Northwest Harbor at dawn, remembered opening day in 1985, when he and his brother headed out to toss the first dredge. That year, the much-anticipated first day of fishing was his brother’s birthday, and the dredge came up full of empty shells, Mr. Lenox said.

It was an environmental and economic calamity for the region, but it got the attention of legislators and spurred a number of clean water initiatives aimed at reducing nitrate and phosphate levels and improving water quality in the estuary. Although there have been other less harmful algae blooms, there has been no repeat of the brown tide in the Peconics since 1995.

No one notices an algae bloom in the bays more than the commercial fishermen who spend time on and in the water.

“I can tell by the prop wash,” Mr. Lenox said. “The color of the water coming off the propeller. Used to be, even on the way out to Gardiners Island, the prop wash was the color of coffee most of the way. This year it’s been clear.”

So the scallops are coming back strong.

In 2006, the restoration program headed by Mr. Tettelbach began to support wild bay scallop populations by planting millions of larval scallops. The results have been remarkable, with overall annual Peconic Bay harvests from 2010 to 2016 coming in nine to 30 times higher than average annual harvests in the decade before the program began.

The Peconic Bay scallop, one of the disappearing foods brought aboard the Slow Food organization’s “Ark of Taste” — an endangered species list of American foods — is back on the menus of New York’s fine restaurants — and back on the delivery list this fall for Fresh Direct online grocery customers. Southold Fish Market reports selling over 400 pounds of scallops to Fresh Direct in the first week of the 2017 season.

Scalloping is a hands-on job, and by the end of the day, the culler on a scallop boat has examined every one for size, maturity and liveliness. The work requires expertise in the life cycle of the Peconic Bay scallop, because getting the largest, sweetest, most marketable bivalves depends on understanding the physiological changes that take place over the mollusks’ two-year lifespan.

By November, when scalloping season opens, the adults have recovered from spawning, developing a deeper and more globe-shaped shell with a slightly raised ring, and are ready to eat. It’s this growth ring that baymen look for when they bring up a dredge-full of scallops. Juvenile scallops without a growth ring go back into the bay to grow another year and spawn. Scallops spawn once, and the adults die of old age during the winter months, so there is no guilt in eating an adult bay scallop.

The size and number of bug, or juvenile, scallops in the 2016 season was the largest in anybody’s memory, a good sign for the health of the fishery. But the size of the juvenile scallops also presented a problem.

“Illegal harvesting of bug scallops may have had significant adverse effects on the scallop population,” Mr. Tettelbach said. “It will likely mean the scallop harvest for the next two seasons will be lower than it might have been otherwise.”

“I heard they were writing a lot of tickets,” said Nate Phillips of Alice’s Fish Market in Greenport, describing DEC efforts to curb illegal fishing of juvenile scallops, which he was glad to see. At least two of those tickets were issued this past winter to fishermen in the waters off Shelter Island, when New York State DEC officers determined that 15 percent of their total catch consisted of juvenile scallops. In most years, the DEC does not write a single ticket for illegal fishing of juvenile scallops. In 2016 twice as many tickets were recorded as in any year in a decade.

Baymen are reporting that they see very few juvenile scallops, especially compared to last year, confirming what the scientists are seeing.

Once nearly extinct, Peconic Bay scallops are back, providing a winter boost to the East End economy.

“Obviously we’d all like to get back to what it was before the brown tide in 1985,” Mr. Tettelbach said. “That’s what we are shooting for.”